Nvidia Quadro K5000 Professional Graphics Card Review. Page 6

The new generation on Nvidia Kepler graphics architecture has finally reached the professional graphics accelerators. We managed to get our hands on the first graphics card with the new architecture designed for high-performance workstations – Quadro K5000. Let’s see how more advanced the new product is compared with the good time-tested Quadro 5000.

Autodesk AutoCAD 2013

Here’s another popular 3D modeling suite that uses DirectX. As with 3ds Max, Nvidia offers special support for AutoCAD developers but, unfortunately, the corresponding mini-driver for the Quadro series hasn’t been updated for a long time. Its latest version is only compatible with AutoCAD 2011. That’s why users of this software suite cannot fully benefit from the advantages offered by Nvidia’s latest professional cards. It means that there is no fundamental difference between the Quadro and GeForce series products based on the Kepler architecture.

As you can see, the gaming card GeForce GTX 680 is very close in performance to the Quadro K5000. The latter isn’t much different from the previous-generation professional card, either, except for specific situations. They differ when you enable specific visual styles in AutoCAD 2013.

The Quadro K5000 turns out to be better than the other graphics cards at processing 2D design drawings with the Hidden style when objects are represented as carcasses and you can’t see their back edges. The Fermi-based professional card is best in the Wireframe and Conceptual modes whereas the gaming card is most efficient with the Realistic style.

It must be noted that if Nvidia releases its mini-driver for AutoCAD 2013, the situation my change dramatically. Judging by the previous versions, we can expect the Quadro series to get many times as fast as they are now with proper software support.

MAXON Cinema 4D (CINEBENCH R11.5)

Maxon Cinema 4D is a popular software suite for 3D modeling and animation. Its speed can be evaluated by means of the specialized benchmark CINEBENCH. The latter uses the engine of Cinema 4D version R11.4 but, according to its developers, can also provide some notion of a graphics card’s performance in the up-to-date Cinema 4D R14.

According to CINEBENCH, the new Kepler-based professional card Quadro K5000 is 14% faster than the Fermi-based Quadro 5000.